1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to distributed computing environments, and more particularly to improved methods for managing deployment of software in distributed computing environments.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a typical software development environment, there exists a gap between the finished software product and its target deployment computing environment. The responsibility of carrying a software product into real-life operation is typically left to the deployment engineer or technician, who often does not have first-hand knowledge of the details and requirements of the developed software product. The usual means to carry a software product into operation is via manually created scripts or other tooling that functions solely in the operations computing environment. Additionally, the configuration information of the software product is passed in the form of notes, spreadsheets or presentation slides that lack a formal construct. Conventionally, deployment of a software product is documented on paper or a pictorial document without an intuitive mechanism for realizing or enforcing the defined topology.
The approach above can result in difficulty for the deployment engineer or technician, who often is forced to deal with solving configuration problems that arise from incompatibilities between the requirements of the developed software product and the capabilities provided by the target computing environment. These problems persist throughout the lifecycle of the software product and the gap worsens with the move of the software product during different stages, such as the moves from unit testing to integration and further to production. Since the software product is not developed in light of the target computing environment, this often results in a software product that cannot properly be deployed or replicated in different computing environments and must be re-architected.
Often times, a software product must be deployed in a distributed computing environment wherein components of the software product are located in different locations and must work in concert over a network. Another problem with the approach above is that it does not provide adequate information on how various components of a software product can be divided or distributed when the product is deployed in a distributed computing environment. Various relationships and dependences exist between components of a software product, and the manner in which a software product is divided or parsed in a distributed computing environment depends on those relationships and dependences. The deployment engineer or technician responsible for deploying a software product in a distributed computing environment often does not have the necessary knowledge of the relationships and dependences that exist between components of a software product so as to effectuate such a deployment. As such, this produces problems during deployment, maintenance and further development of the software product.
Therefore, there is a need to overcome the shortcomings of the prior art and more particularly for a more efficient way of deploying a defined topology in a distributed computing environment.